Margaret Heffernan

Everywhere I look, there are ads marking Mother's Day. Mostly they conform to stereotype: flowers, jewelry, perfume. Not a lot of books. Not many computers. Few tools. Little that's useful.

We don't go in for this nonsense in our household. Why? Because one day to celebrate mothers is ludicrously...

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

Every time I go to a conference about creativity and innovation, I'm struck by just how uncreative and dull they are: hideous bland venues that are too big and lack emotion house stale formats and dreary presentation. So setting a digital media conference inside Bath's Assembly Rooms was clearly something...

Nobody should be surprised by Robert Bales' alleged rampage, killing 16 Afghanis. The amount of rage and pain in the U.S. military has been obvious to anyone close to the army for several years. In 2010, for my book Willful Blindness, I interviewed Cythia Thomas, proprietor of the...

For the first time in my life, I got to teach a law school class last month. I was the guest of Frank Partnoy one of the best business writers I know. What's great about Partnoy is that he's worked on Wall Street, knows the law, understands economics...

If The Guardian and the BBC are to be believed, Daniel Kahnemann is the world's greatest living psychologist. This is quite a claim -- but is it true? Let's examine some of the candidates.

Albert Bandura is the most cited psychologist alive. That means that other academics quote...

When I moved to the US in the 1990s, one of my first and best discoveries was Eileen Fisher. I'd never encountered the brand before so I was delighted by beautifully simple clothes, elegant, made from gorgeous fabrics, that all mixed and matched with each other and, apparently, with just...

Many, many years ago, I produced David Starkey's first film for the BBC. A short film about my favourite Tudor, Henry VII, it wasn't Starkey's TV debut - he'd already appeared, clad in leathers riding a motorbike on Channel 4 - but he was still a media neophyte and still,...

Some years ago, I was running a company that represented independent film and TV producers in the UK. Among other things, we negotiated agreements between producers and the unions that were critically important to the industry. The electricians' union was particularly tough and heading into that negotiation was never going...

In the select committee today, Adrian Sanders asked the Murdochs if they were familiar with the term 'wilful blindness'. The silence was stunning and said everything.

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A...

According to Bloomberg, News Corporation is now undervalued because of the scandals blighting its operations. Murdoch isn't an asset anymore; he's a liability. Hitherto awed and silent shareholders are, rather like MPs, getting their courage back. In suggesting that perhaps the company would benefit from different leadership, they...

Why isn't the banking crisis as profound an outrage as the phone hacking scandal?

I appreciate that everyone has phones and therefore can understand how obnoxious phone hacking is. Like everyone else I share the revulsion that followed the revelation that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked. And yes I'm...

Last week, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath, one of the top 10 universities in the UK. It was a doctorate in business -- and I received it one day after the revelations concerning News Corporation's hacking of phones owned by victims of crime.

This...

When my first child was two, my older sister said to me, "Your children need you more when they get older." At the time, I thought this was just another example of sibling passive aggression. Of course she, with three teenagers, was bound to imply that she had it hard...

Why did it take Rebekah Brooks so long to resign? Did she want to stay or did Murdoch want to keep her? We may never know. But the whole saga looks to me like a bad case of gatecrasher syndrome.

Gatecrasher syndrome afflicts members of minorities who enjoy rapid...

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A few rogue, or over-zealous employees just went off piste. Then the full scale of the debacle emerges and another face-saving fiction emerges: no one could possibly...

David Cameron has acknowledged the press needs better oversight - but this isn't news. When the public was being abused by hacking journalists, what was the PCC doing? Nothing - because it has never actively looked after the interests of the public. That's not what it was set...

Shutting News of the World looks like such a grand gesture. In fact, it's another attempt to look like something is being done -- while in fact changing nothing fundamental within News International.

Shutting the 168-year-old paper isn't a great sacrifice (although, since it was Murdoch's first UK paper,...

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. Rogue employees just went off piste.

That argument was wrong in Abu Ghraib, in Enron, WorldCom, Countrywide, HBOS and it's wrong today at News International. The phone...

The Walmart victory is depressing and disheartening. But after the rage, two issues stand out which women should pay attention to.

It's Not Just Walmart
Walmart has been exceptional in its determination to admit nothing and fight to the bitter end, using the force of its financial muscle to...